Alexander R. Galloway > Quotes

“We are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system,” wrote Donna Haraway, “from all work to all play, a deadly game.”10 With the growing significance of immaterial labor, and the concomitant increase in cultivation and exploitation of play—creativity, innovation, the new, the singular, flexibility, the supplement—as a productive force, play will become more and more linked to broad social structures of control. Today we are no doubt witnessing the end of play as politically progressive, or even politically neutral.)”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture

“Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.”
― Alexander R. Galloway

“Although affiliated with materialist philosophy and particularly the historical materialism of Marx, Laruelle’s conception of the real is not simply reducible to a kind of primary matter or empirical reality. He has no interest in debating whether or not the real world exists outside our ability to observe it, or whether or not the real world is constructed out of countless small material atoms. These are the squabbles of philosophy, after all. The real, as non-philosophical, is defined precisely and axiomatically by Laruelle. The real is the unilateral duality specific to an immanent one.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“Laruelle endorses identity of the same, not heterogeneity or difference; his non-standard method requires ascetic withdrawal, not the kind of self-realization associated with the “me generation” of post-1968 philosophy; his ontology is rooted in a cryptography of being, not the more popular pornography of being (evident in the virtues of transparency, the strategies of capture, or the logics of aletheia); he requires a unilateral relation, not today’s hegemony of multilateral ecologies of difference (assemblages, rhizomes, networks). No wonder that Laruelle has been overlooked for so many years.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“This book is about a diagram, a technology, and a management style. The”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

“What if philosophy is the problem, not the solution? What if the best response to philosophy is to cease doing it?”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“Like the rhizome, each node in a distributed network may establish direct communication with another node, without having to appeal to a hierarchical intermediary. Yet in order to initiate communication, the two nodes must speak the same language. This is why protocol is important. Shared”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

“Often it is precisely those places in culture that appear politically innocent that are at the end of the day the most politically charged.”
― Alexander R. Galloway

“digitality entails a basic distinction, whether zeros and ones or some other set of discrete units—the four nucleobases of the genetic code or the twenty-six letters of the alphabet are just as digital as the base-two numeric encoding used in binary computers. Any digital medium will have a bed of genetically distinct elements. These elements form a homogeneous substrate from which constructions are built.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital

“I hope to show in this book that it is through protocol that one must guide one’s efforts, not against it.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

“Dividuation would thus be the opposite: the dissolving of individual identity into distributed networks of information.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

“The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, describes the DNS system as the “one centralized Achilles’ heel by which {the Web} can all be brought down or controlled.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

“The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go. (...) We must scale up, not unplug. Then, during the passage of technology into this injured, engorged, and unguarded condition, it will be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its users.”
― Alexander R. Galloway, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Volume 21)